Our sponsor did WHAT??

For a California sports team, having a solar company as a sponsor is supposed to give your franchise a warm green glow. Yes, we may bust heads on the field, but we care about sustainability too! Especially in the eco-conscious Bay Area, it looks good in the public’s eye and it brings in a few ad dollars to boot. Hard to go wrong with that.

The day before the Niners made their new sponsor announcement with JinkoSolar , an angry crowd of more than 500 people gathered outside a JinkoSolar plant.

Unless, of course, the solar company who sponsors your team becomes the focus of violent protests for allegedly contaminating a river and killing a bunch of fish.

Such is the situation facing the San Francisco 49ers. Last week, the team announced a sponsorship agreement with JinkoSolar Holding Co., one of the fast-growing Chinese companies whose low-cost panels have shaken up the solar industry (and contributed to the high-profile bankruptcy of Fremont’s Solyndra). As the team’s lone solar sponsor for the 2011-2012 season, JinkoSolar gets to display its signage throughout Candlestick Park, including on the scoreboard. The team even renamed the stadium’s Gate F as “JinkoSolar Gate” for the rest of the season.

The day before the Niners made the announcement, however, an angry crowd of more than 500 people gathered outside a JinkoSolar plant in Haining city, west of Shanghai. Pollution from the plant, they said, had tainted the local river and poisoned the fish. The protest lasted for several days and turned ugly, with demonstrators flipping cars and damaging police vehicles. Thirty one people were detained.

Faced with a PR disaster, the company started cleaning up the waterway and the adjacent soil, agreeing to pay compensation for any damage to local crops and livestock. JinkoSolar blamed the pollution on a string of events. The waste-hauling company that had been serving the plant abruptly stopped doing so in late August, leading JinkoSolar to store its industrial waste outside the plant’s warehouse in covered bins. Heavy rains on Aug. 24 and 25 may have washed the waste into the stream.

China’s rapid rise as an industrial powerhouse has led to many local protests over environmental damage, but few have received this much coverage. So are the Niners concerned about the incident? Are they reconsidering the sponsorship, or are they satisfied with JinkoSolar’s response?

“We definitely have been in discussions with them, and they’ve kept us up to speed with what they’re doing,” said team spokesman Steve Weakland. “We don’t have any further comment.”